Concepts of Career and General Education. ERIC/Higher Education Research Report No. 8.

Olson, Paul A.

General education may be described as: (1) encyclopedic education; (2) education in seminal authors; (3) education in primary investigative paradigms or logics; and (4) an advising tool designed to assure fairly even distribution of students among the early college courses. Obviously it is not a concept having a single very generally understood definition. Career education, on the other hand, is supposed to give a person the tools to find what he wants to do over long stretches of time, not only as a job-holder but also as hobbyist, citizen, house man or woman--the tools to make a life's work meaningful. The notion of what constitutes each of these types of education changes radically from period to period as cultures develop new information and societal needs. Three issues to be addressed are: (1) Under what educational circumstances is it possible to give people a chance to construct a conception of career or life's work while giving them a critical understanding of their world? (2) What are the circumstances that make education for a life's work turn into what people see as "training the young like animals to perform certain external duties?"; and (3) What are the circumstances that turn general education into education that does not develop a sense of meaning in work, or make life's work possible, satisfying, and meaningful? (MSE)